Homes built for every landscape.

Hart County sits on the Georgia–South Carolina line where the Tugaloo and Seneca rivers pool into 56,000 acres of Lake Hartwell. It's the only county in Georgia named for a woman — Revolutionary War figure Nancy Hart — and the Cherokee called a spot just south of town the center of the world. This is a lake county with a real downtown attached. Come for the water; stay for the square.

Berrien is Michigan's southwest corner: forty miles of Lake Michigan dunes, the state's oldest wine appellation, an orchard belt that supplies half the Midwest, and two entirely different visitor economies stacked on the same county. The southern towns — collectively trademarked as Harbor Country — are Chicago's weekend, ninety minutes away by car or Amtrak. The northern twin cities of St. Joseph and Benton Harbor are a working harbor and a real downtown. Both are worth your time. They are not the same trip.

Sandoval runs from the northern edge of Albuquerque up into a collapsed supervolcano and west across badlands toward the Navajo Nation. It contains a Rio Grande bosque, a 13-mile-wide caldera, hot springs, a 17th-century Spanish mission ruin, hoodoos, and a volcanic plug you can climb in two miles. It also contains six sovereign Pueblo nations, and how you behave on and around their land is the most important thing in this guide.

Suffolk is the eastern two-thirds of Long Island: 900-plus square miles, roughly 1.5 million residents, and a landscape that runs from inner-ring suburb to Gilded Age estate to pine barrens to barrier island to wine country to Montauk. Nothing about it behaves like the other counties in this series. It is not a destination; it is four destinations that share a government. Montauk Point to the Nassau line is ninety miles and can take three hours on a July Friday.

The glaciers that flattened the rest of the Midwest stopped short of southeast Ohio, which is why this county has steep ridgelines, sandstone outcrops, and river gorges where the rest of the state has cornfields. Layer a 220-year-old university on top of a 19th-century coal region and you get Athens: a genuinely strange, genuinely good small city with forty miles of singletrack starting three blocks from downtown, a brewery that ships nationally, and a festival calendar built around a fruit most Americans have never eaten.

Sanpete is a fifty-mile agricultural valley in the exact middle of Utah, walled by the San Pitch Mountains on the west and the 11,000-foot Wasatch Plateau on the east. Danish and Swedish converts settled it in the 1850s and left behind oolite limestone homes, a a temple visible from twenty miles off, and one town so intact the entire thing is on the National Register. The interstate went around it. That's the whole appeal.

Roughly 2,500 people spread across 2,460 square miles, with a national park in the middle of them. Wayne County runs from the 11,000-foot Aquarius Plateau — one of the largest high plateaus in North America — down through a green irrigated valley on the Fremont River, then east across the Waterpocket Fold and out into badlands and desert toward the Henry Mountains. Early settlers called the fold country "Wayne Wonderland" and the "Land of the Sleeping Rainbow," which is florid and also about right. Everything in this guide sits within 75 miles of Highway 24.